The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest

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СКАЧАТЬ alive in our hearts

      as yesterday or tomorrow

      or the ghost ship from Athens

      plying its shuttered bark

      crying Zeus! Zeus!

      as it shatters this pier.

People in Wartime

      Attilio, the minor Hun,

      Rose with the sun.

      Washed his face

      In a little grape

      And cried, This is I.

      This is one who would

      Conquer

      The fever

      And the world outside.

      With this he took a stride

      Across his hall bedroom,

      Faced the broken glass

      And into the mirror sighed,

      Such was I.

      Now am I to become

      This singular juxtaposition

      Between the man

      And his decision

      Am I history, or am I a plot?

      Or such was his reflection

      For

      He was not interested

      In

      Art

      Or politics

      Or women

      Or even getting ahead,

      I have said

      He was a minor character

      And his misery

      Was not Alpine,

      But extremely particular,

      Was he history, or was he not?

Landing

      This afternoon I am very careful.

      I watch myself. I watch the egg

      Unhatched. I am the sight

      Over the egg, like an aviator

      Unknowing, but confident

      That the instrument will behave.

      The window outscaped

      Brings the climate indoors.

      The eye is free, adorned

      By that which is becoming.

      What is near, prevalent, adored

      By the inner is echoed

      By the ear. My conscience

      Is receptive. I sight the cause

      Of the exterior and so I hear

      What is sounded in the interior.

      Yet the break is this:

      The germinal is split.

      Not content with eye and sphere,

      I race the continual

      And drift to the absurd,

      The conjugal, from which

      The flight is only heard.

History

       for Frank O’Hara

      Old Thing

      We have escaped

      from that pale refrigerator

      you wrote about

      Here

      amid the wild woodbine landscapes

      wearing a paper hat

      I recollect

      the idols

      in those frozen tubs

      secluded by buttresses

      when the Church of

      Our Lady cried Enough

      and we were banished

      Sighing

      strangers

      we are

      the last even breath

      poets

      Yet the funicular

      was tied by a rope

      It could only cry

      looking down

      that midnight hill

      My lights are

      bright

      the walk is

      irregular

      your initials

      are carved on the sill.

      Mon Ami!

      the funicular

      has a knife

      in its side

      Ah allow these nightingales to nurse us

Oriental Movie

      Lady your orange back

      is waving at Foujita

      we’re all in a canoe

      sipping the light drink of the tamarind bark

      while the white-eyed paddles

      whisper orange

      and blue

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